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Accessibility Statement

This statement applies to the website dsmlegal.co.uk, which is run by DSM Legal Solicitors Limited.

Prepared and last reviewed on 13 October 2026.

Our commitment

DSM Legal Solicitors wants as many people as possible to be able to use this website. People come to a solicitor at difficult moments — after an accident, during a dispute at work, when making a will or dealing with a bereavement — and nobody should face an extra barrier at that point because of a disability.

We have recently carried out a detailed review of this website against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.2 at Level AA, and made a substantial number of changes as a result. This statement sets out honestly what we have improved, what we know is still not right, and how to tell us if something gets in your way.

What we have improved

Between September and October 2026 we audited the site and made the following changes. All of them are live now and apply to every visitor, whether or not you have answered the cookie banner.

Using the site without a mouse
  • Added a “Skip to main content” link so keyboard users can jump straight past the menu instead of tabbing through it on every page.
  • Added a clear, high-contrast outline that follows the keyboard as you move through links, buttons and form fields, so you can always see where you are.
  • Made the scrolling client review panels reachable by keyboard, where previously they could only be read with a mouse or trackpad.
Using the site with a screen reader
  • Marked up the main content area and the navigation menus properly, and gave each menu a distinct name, so screen-reader users can move between regions of the page rather than reading everything in order.
  • Gave names to links that are only an image — the logo, and the email and telephone icons in the footer — which previously announced as nothing useful.
  • Gave titles to embedded content, including the office location map and our Solicitors Regulation Authority badge.
  • Set the site language to English (UK), so screen readers use a British English voice and pronunciation rather than American.
  • Rebuilt the heading structure across the site: section titles that merely looked like headings are now real headings, every page has a single main heading, and we removed 26 empty headings on our Terms of Use page that a screen reader announced as blank.
Reading and seeing the site
  • Re-enabled pinch-to-zoom on phones and tablets. The site previously blocked zooming, which is a significant barrier for anyone with low vision.
  • Darkened the default link colour and corrected low-contrast text in the footer and on the home page, so text meets the 4.5:1 contrast minimum.
Contacting us through the site
  • Gave every field on every contact form a visible, permanent label. Previously some fields relied on placeholder text, which disappears as soon as you start typing and is not reliably announced by screen readers.
  • Rebuilt the forms so the labels stay correctly attached even where the same form appears more than once on a page.
  • Enlarged the consent checkboxes to at least 24 by 24 pixels, so they are easier to hit accurately with a finger, a stylus or an imprecise pointer.
About the accessibility toolbar

This site offers an optional accessibility toolbar, provided by EqualWeb, which lets you adjust things like text size, contrast and spacing in your browser.

We want to be clear that the toolbar is an extra, not the basis of our accessibility. A toolbar cannot make an inaccessible website accessible, and it is no substitute for a site that works properly with your own assistive technology. The changes listed above were all made to the website itself, and we have deliberately tested the site with the toolbar switched off. You should not need to use it.

How accessible this website is

This website is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA. “Partially conformant” means that most of the site meets the standard, but some parts do not. We know about the following problems and we are working on them.

  • The cookie consent banner. The on/off switches for each cookie category, inside the “View preferences” panel, do not have names that a screen reader can announce. This part of the banner is generated by a third-party plugin and we cannot correct it ourselves; we have raised it with the supplier.
  • Some section sub-headings on our service pages — for example the “Contact” and “Address” labels — are still styled text rather than true headings. They read correctly but do not appear in a screen reader’s list of headings.
  • A small number of footer contrast readings have not yet been confirmed by hand. We believe these are a quirk of how the automated tool measures our theme rather than a real problem, but we have not finished checking.
  • Third-party content. The embedded location map, the live chat widget, the spam-protection control on our forms and our Solicitors Regulation Authority badge are supplied by other companies. We have named and labelled them as far as we are able, but we do not control what is inside them.
How we tested this website

Testing was carried out in September and October 2026 on a representative sample of pages, including the home page, About Us, Contact, our main service pages, the blog and our Terms of Use page. We used automated testing with the axe accessibility engine, together with manual inspection of the underlying page code, and we checked the site in the state a first-time visitor sees it — that is, before any cookie choice has been made.

We want to be straightforward about the limits of that testing. This website has not yet been tested by disabled people, and we have not yet tested it with assistive technology such as a screen reader, speech recognition software or screen magnification. Automated tools find only around a third of accessibility problems, and they can report a clean result on markup that is genuinely difficult to use.

We regard that as the most important gap in this statement, rather than any single technical issue listed above, and arranging assistive-technology testing is our next step.

Tell us if you have a problem

If you cannot use part of this website, or you need information from us in a different format — large print, audio, an accessible document, or anything that works better with your own assistive technology — please tell us. We will do our best to put it right, and in the meantime we will give you the information you need another way.

Email: info@dsmlegal.co.uk
Telephone: 01925 937070
Post: DSM Legal Solicitors, 25 Bold Street, Warrington WA1 1HQ

We aim to reply within five working days.

Please tell us which page you were on and what happened. You do not need to know the technical cause — a plain description such as “I could not get past the cookie banner using only my keyboard” is exactly what helps us most.